Meeting for Sufferings: Friends consider gender and diversity
Representatives heard reports from the second diversity and inclusion conference in January 2020
Friends came together on 1 February to reflect on the issue of diversity and inclusion following the second conference on the subject, which took place at Woodbrooke last month. Margaret Bryan, the Meeting for Sufferings’ (MfS) clerk, read a reflection from Sophie Bevan, who attended the Woodbrooke gathering as a MfS representative. This was followed by a report from Sam McNair, another MfS representative.
According to Sophie Bevan, the conference on 17-19 January was divided into three topics: gender, race and disability. Despite ‘hoping for a positive weekend with like-minded individuals’, she said: ‘It wasn’t quite like that.’
A talk on gender by Heather Brunskell-Evans as a representative of the Gender Critical Friends group was ‘received with love’ by the thirty or so attenders, said Sophie, but was ‘challenging’ and ‘expressed strong views on transgender issues’, which resulted in several Friends sharing the next morning ‘deep-seated feelings; of fear and of isolation, of precious safe spaces being invaded and of betraying our Quaker values of equality’.
She was also disturbed by ‘the implicit distrust of men’, she said, and ‘the use of the term “gender critical” when the main thrust of the conversation was on excluding transgender people from female-only spaces’.
Praising the session by Anthony Reddie on race in Christianity as ‘bold and entertaining’, she said his talk questioned the presumption of the ‘whiteness in God’ and ‘looked inwards to our origins’.
Overall, she left the conference feeling energised and motivated, but was surprised at ‘self-congratulatory remarks’ made by members ‘on how far we had come’, while she felt that many of the conversations had not moved on from discussions ten years ago.
Sam McNair paid tribute to the speakers at the conference who were ‘involved and engaged with the issues’ and the ‘courage’ of the organisers for allowing a gender-critical voice. When the gender issue was raised in the closing worship last year, he said it caused some distress but, as one Friend observed to him, now ‘we can discuss hard stuff tenderly’. He said he now felt ‘challenged or enabled to go back to Meeting and challenge my Meeting’ and felt that ‘we made a little bit of progress’.
However, he also wondered whether Quakers now need to be moving on beyond the issue and suggested an Epistle. This, he felt, would give the gathering ‘a sense of purpose’ and allow ‘the wider body of Friends to know what has been discussed and discerned’.
Friends at MfS then divided into threshing groups to consider three pre-set questions: ‘What do you fear most about openly and unreservedly accepting transwomen into your Meeting?’; ‘What reservations do you have about accepting a group of black men into your Meeting?’; and ‘What problems do you anticipate in fully accepting a severely disabled child into your Meeting?’
In one threshing group, Friends talked mostly about the issue of accepting trans people into the community.
One member who had worked as a therapist with trans people said: ‘I am deeply shocked when I hear about Quakers rejecting them. Trans people have already struggled with feelings about themselves and the way they are treated in our society. As Quakers we need to welcome everyone. For me, it is a given that we take them as they self-define and accept them lovingly.’
Another Friend, who had attended both gatherings on the issue, said she shared this shock: ‘If we have a testimony of equality, who has the right to say we accept equality but not for them?’
As Friends reassembled in the Sarah Fell room, they were asked to reflect on the question: ‘As a result of this session, what will you be doing next?’
Some Quakers in the room took issue at the three questions set. ‘We rather baulked at the questions because they seemed to assume there would be these fears, these prejudices, but when we discussed it, there weren’t,’ one said.
‘If only we could get transwomen, black people and disabled children into the Meeting!’ said a representative from Quaker World Relations Committee (QWRC). ‘Our problem is the lack of diversity in our Meetings. How do we get these people through the doors?’
Another Friend mused: ‘One of the first things I am going to do is find out if there’s a problem I’ve missed. I didn’t see that having transwomen in our Meeting was a problem.’
One Young Friend told the room that the threshing session had made her feel ‘hope’. ‘As a young person, I feel we are trying to be open and diverse and I’m thankful we’re trying so hard.’
There was also a plea for patience with one Friend welcoming the fact that the Woodbrooke conference had allowed a gender-critical voice, as there were Friends who felt they had been ‘silenced’. Some Friends were fearful ‘of getting it wrong’, she said, and she called for a balance between acceptance and recognising ‘those who have been hurt’ instead of automatically branding them as transphobic.
A representative from the Quaker Committee for Christian and Interfaith Relations (QCCIR) said that we should give thanks ‘to the diversity in our meeting – for the gay couple, the people of colour and the disabled child’, while another pointed out that ‘every time we’re told we’re all white and middle-class, those who [aren’t] are effectively being told they don’t belong’.
Perhaps we haven’t said everyone is welcome ‘explicitly enough to the people who need to hear it’, wondered one representative from Young Friends General Meeting (YFGM), who added that one thing to come out of YFGM was the importance of seeing people as ‘friends and not characteristics’.
The ministry sharing drew to a close with one Friend commenting that, ‘It’s not about what we do corporately but what we do as individuals… So much is about our fear of getting it wrong and looking stupid. But we’re supposed to get it wrong and look stupid. Because that gives us a chance to learn… and be humble. God didn’t make us perfect.’
The minute said: ‘We have welcomed the fact that this conference has enabled a range of voices to be heard, and have expressed our thanks for the diversity amongst Friends. Nevertheless, we recognise the limitations of our inclusiveness and our fear of getting things wrong. It is in the fear of our imperfection that we may be open to letting God intervene in our lives.’
